Comment by 0x457 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x457 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have a personal laptop and use iPad Pro instead. I have a work laptop that I only use for work and I never take on vacations with me.

iPad Pro gives me:

- amazing SSH terminal

- ability to download content from streaming services to long-haul flights

- a decent size screen for watching TV in bed (my bedroom has a layout that prevents me from placing TV anywhere)

- a good steam/xcloud client

- when latency is too high for SSH, I have RPi I connect with USB-C to iPad and shows up as Ethernet adapter powered from iPad.

- a few games to play on the iPad itself when away

- I have a thunderbolt dock that my main PC is connected to, I can switch to my iPad. That with Stage Manager gives essentially focus-mode mac.

- nice screen (quality and size) to read things (not books, eInk is king there)

- nice screen to look at recipes while I cook

You might notice that none of these tasks require a powerful CPU, and you will be right. I got iPad Pro because of screen size and thunderbolt. Might switch to the new one because the camera is finally in the right place.

If I could run IntelliJ on iPad, even in remote mode - I wouldn't even think about buying a laptop.

The screen quality is surely good, but why wouldn't an iPad air or Samsung whatever work just as well for all these use cases? Also, it seems that you connect a keyboard, a mouse, a game pad and a display... Cool that it works, but that is very far from out of box experience.

The airs screen was good but not great. Not compared to the 13” pro.

As for peripheral, not at all. My iPad lives mostly in its keyboard folio. I also regularly use a USB-C dock with it for either Ethernet access, HDMI output to hotel TVs, or memory card reading (camera). I know a few people who carry around 8bitdo Bluetooth game controllers for use with all sorts of devices (steam deck, laptop, phone, iPad). If you’re a diehard gamer, it’s well worth it.

> But why wouldn't an iPad air work just as well for all these use cases?

I don't remember whether it had USB-C at the time or not, but it definitely didn't have Thunderbolt, which is a requirement for me.

> Samsung

Same with thunderbolt, but also I can't stand Samsung's version of Android. I wish Pixel Slate kept evolving. The Android tablet experience in general isn't great. Blink terminal is 12/10 experience, there is no app like that for Android. However, on Samsung, I would be able to just install NixOS in VM on the tablet, so there is that.

> Cool that it works, but that is very far from out of box experience.

Well, yes, but first it's just one cable and a game pad that I already had. I didn't buy any of those things specifically for the iPad. For me, it was an out-of-the-box experience.

I'd like to mention that when I got my iPad Pro, I had zero apple products at my house.

Blink really turned me off when they started running some automatic shell script that curl | bash's some static version of mosh from their servers without me noticing in order to 'improve' the experience.

No, don't run anything on my servers thanks. I don't even care if there's an option to turn it off.

Switched to termius, I'll miss being able to use custom fonts but meh.

Good call on SSH terminal. I use Prompt all the time to get on my workstation.

iPad Pro 4:3 264ppi screen = unmatched vertical real estate for SSH CLI and text editing, especially with vertical split screen window management.

Years ago there were 4:3 Thinkpads. Then OEMs moved to 16:9 aspect ratios for video content, some claiming that the economics were no longer viable for 4:3 displays. Yet Apple continues to ship millions of 4:3 screens for iPads.

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